"Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Mr. Higginbotham's Castrophe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)

anybody awake to hear it. But he met neither ox team, light wagon
chaise, horseman, nor foot traveller, till, just as he crossed
Salmon River, a man came trudging down to the bridge with a bundle
over his shoulder, on the end of a stick.

"Good morning, mister," said the pedlar, reining in his mare. "If
you come from Kimballton or that neighborhood, may be you can tell
me the real fact about this affair of old Mr. Higginbotham. Was the
old fellow actually murdered two or three nights ago, by an Irishman
and a nigger?"

Dominicus had spoken in too great a hurry to observe, at first,
that the stranger himself had a deep tinge of Negro blood. On
hearing this sudden question, the Ethiopian appeared to change his
skin, its yellow hue becoming a ghastly white, while, shaking and
stammering, he thus replied: "No! no! There was no colored man! It was
an Irishman that hanged him last night, at eight o'clock. I came
away at seven! His folks can't have looked for him in the orchard
yet."

Scarcely had the yellow man spoken, when he interrupted himself,
and though he seemed weary enough before, continued his journey at a
pace which would have kept the pedlar's mare on a smart trot.
Dominicus started after him in great perplexity. If the murder had not
been committed till Tuesday night, who was the prophet that had
foretold it, in all its circumstances, on Tuesday morning? If Mr.
Higginbotham's corpse were not yet discovered by his own family, how
came the mulatto, at above thirty miles' distance, to know that he was
hanging in the orchard, especially as he had left Kimballton before
the unfortunate man was hanged at all? These ambiguous
circumstances, with the stranger's surprise and terror, made Dominicus
think of raising a hue and cry after him, as an accomplice in the
murder; since a murder, it seemed, had really been perpetrated.

"But let the poor devil go," thought the pedlar. "I don't want
his black blood on my head; and hanging the nigger wouldn't unhang Mr.
Higginbotham. Unhang the old gentleman! It's a sin, I know; but I
should hate to have him come to life a second time, and give me the
lie!"

With these meditations, Dominicus Pike drove into the street of
Parker's Falls, which, as everybody knows, is as thriving a village as
three cotton factories and a slitting mill can make it. The
machinery was not in motion, and but a few of the shop doors unbarred,
when he alighted in the stable yard of the tavern, and made it his
first business to order the mare four quarts of oats. His second duty,
of course, was to impart Mr. Higginbotham's catastrophe to the
hostler. He deemed it advisable, however, not to be too positive as to
the date of the direful fact, and also to be uncertain whether it were
perpetrated by an Irishman and a mulatto, or by the son of Erin alone.